Hot Stone Massage

What the treatment is

Relax your muscles and melt away tension with a luxuriously soothing full body hot stone massage. Heated stones are used to knead and massage the body for a deeply therapeutic experience.

The useful way to think about hot stone massage is that heat substitutes for force. Warm muscle tissue is more pliable and guards less, so a therapist working with heated stones reaches depth that would otherwise require sustained, heavy pressure.

That makes it the obvious choice for anyone who wants the results of deep work but finds the pressure of a deep tissue session unpleasant. At 75 minutes it is also the longest massage on the menu.

How the stones are actually used

There is a common assumption that hot stone massage means lying still with rocks placed on your back for an hour. Placement is part of it, but it is not the main event.

1. Stones are placed along the back, and sometimes in the palms, to begin warming the tissue while the session gets underway.
2. The therapist then works with a stone held in the hand, using it as an extension of the hand — gliding, kneading, and working into tissue with heat as well as pressure.
3. Hands and stones alternate throughout. It is a hot stone massage, not a stone placement.
4. Stones are swapped as they cool, which is why the therapist moves between the table and the heater during the session.

The stones are smooth basalt, which holds heat well and releases it slowly. They are heated in water to a controlled temperature and tested before they touch you, and the therapist is holding them throughout — so any stone that is too hot is felt by the therapist first.

Why this one is studio-only

Hot Stone Massage cannot be performed in your home. The stones require a heater that holds a controlled water temperature, and that equipment does not travel — which is also true of the Luxury Full Body Polish and the Hydrating Body Wrap.

The studio is at 7700 West Northwest Highway, Suite 720, Studio 271, inside Mattison Avenue Salon & Spa, in the Lincoln Park Center across from NorthPark Center. It is a private treatment studio inside another business and is by appointment only. If it is your first visit, read finding the studio first — there are two building entrances and the right one is not obvious.

Who should not book it

Heat is the active ingredient, so the contraindications are all heat-related:

• Reduced or altered sensation anywhere, including neuropathy from diabetes. If you cannot reliably feel heat, you cannot tell us when it is too much.
• Pregnancy — book prenatal massage instead, which is performed in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters only.
• Conditions affected by heat, including some cardiovascular and blood pressure conditions. Please ask your doctor rather than guessing.
• Recent sunburn, or inflamed or broken skin in the areas to be worked.
• Acute inflammation or a fresh injury — heat is the wrong tool in the first days after an acute strain.

Afterwards, and how to schedule it

Hot stone is the most sedating treatment on the menu. Clients routinely describe feeling pleasantly heavy and slightly spaced for a couple of hours afterwards. That is the treatment working, but it makes scheduling matter.

• Do not book it immediately before something that needs sharpness.
• Drink water afterwards — heat plus bodywork is dehydrating.
• Give yourself an unhurried exit. Late afternoon works well.
• Allow extra time for your first visit to find the studio.

There is more on what the heat is doing, and who it suits, in what does a hot stone massage do for you.